Hello guys,
If you haven't followed much the techs news recently, apple is slowly shifting towards using conventional USB connectors, and the rest of the industry is preparing to use USB-C connectors compatible with USB3.1 and future updates. Basically that's a similar thing to the Lightning connector as it is reversible and tinier and allows for more things to pass through, but as a standard universally adopted. As of now though, thunderbolt 2 and soon 3 are way superior. A big, big feature of thunderbolt is the ability to chain devices by design, which makes it SUPER handy for setting up a station with everything you own in a single cable, being a laptop user this is pure practicality. I go home, plug, and I'm now on a desktop station and everything turns ON automatically, and are all powered. I can't do that without a complex setup in USB. For any desktop user, it also means not having a shitload of cables going on, as you can just chain things up and keep your desk neat. Not to mention it's fast enough for the fastest SSD on the market.
EDIT : forgot to mention an important point especially in audio : TB basically means direct to the PCIe bus, so a thunderbolt interface can offer PCIe grade latency, like I believe 1 or 2ms latency without any special CPU overload nor drop/click.
I am wondering what it will mean for future Mac interfaces. Right now, I have a thunderbolt rig set up, and I was considering the apogee ensemble as the center of my setup, being a thunderbolt interface so it integrates perfectly.
However I am wondering if this is yet another connector created and abandoned too soon by apple, and these kind of interfaces are too expensive to not be sure I will use it for a decade at least.
There is if I am not mistaken, a distinction to make between the connector, USB-C, and the port, usb3.1, or thunderbolt. My guess is, Apple could shift to USB-c pined thunderbolt bridges. In this case a simple adapter will always exist and will virtually not change anything to the rig anyone could set up right now. But if the thunderbolt protocol will disappear for the usb3.1 or updates, that means an adapter from one protocol to another and I usually don't like the idea. In this case maybe I will simply loose all the chainability and power age feature. It hasn't always been stable in the past to patch up like that between protocols if they have radically different designs
Anyone's knows anything useful to predict what protocol to expect for interfaces in the next few years ?
If you haven't followed much the techs news recently, apple is slowly shifting towards using conventional USB connectors, and the rest of the industry is preparing to use USB-C connectors compatible with USB3.1 and future updates. Basically that's a similar thing to the Lightning connector as it is reversible and tinier and allows for more things to pass through, but as a standard universally adopted. As of now though, thunderbolt 2 and soon 3 are way superior. A big, big feature of thunderbolt is the ability to chain devices by design, which makes it SUPER handy for setting up a station with everything you own in a single cable, being a laptop user this is pure practicality. I go home, plug, and I'm now on a desktop station and everything turns ON automatically, and are all powered. I can't do that without a complex setup in USB. For any desktop user, it also means not having a shitload of cables going on, as you can just chain things up and keep your desk neat. Not to mention it's fast enough for the fastest SSD on the market.
EDIT : forgot to mention an important point especially in audio : TB basically means direct to the PCIe bus, so a thunderbolt interface can offer PCIe grade latency, like I believe 1 or 2ms latency without any special CPU overload nor drop/click.
I am wondering what it will mean for future Mac interfaces. Right now, I have a thunderbolt rig set up, and I was considering the apogee ensemble as the center of my setup, being a thunderbolt interface so it integrates perfectly.
However I am wondering if this is yet another connector created and abandoned too soon by apple, and these kind of interfaces are too expensive to not be sure I will use it for a decade at least.
There is if I am not mistaken, a distinction to make between the connector, USB-C, and the port, usb3.1, or thunderbolt. My guess is, Apple could shift to USB-c pined thunderbolt bridges. In this case a simple adapter will always exist and will virtually not change anything to the rig anyone could set up right now. But if the thunderbolt protocol will disappear for the usb3.1 or updates, that means an adapter from one protocol to another and I usually don't like the idea. In this case maybe I will simply loose all the chainability and power age feature. It hasn't always been stable in the past to patch up like that between protocols if they have radically different designs
Anyone's knows anything useful to predict what protocol to expect for interfaces in the next few years ?
